The Black woman of the South

Bureau of Woman's Work. 105

THE BLACK WOMAN OF THE SOUTH.

The Rev. Alexander Crummell, D.D., formerly a missionary in Africa and now
Rector of St. Luke's Church in Washington, D. C, is a native of Africa, a graduate of
one of the leading Universities of England, who adds to the strength and graces of a
sound scholarship, the devotion of a noble Christian character.

*" From an address made by him upon the " Needs and Neglects of the Black Woman
of the South," we quote his plea for " Woman's Work for Woman." Referring to the
Negro woman in slavery days, he says :

" She was a 'hewer of wood and a drawer of water.' She had to keep
her place in the gang from morn till eve, under the burden of a heavy task,,
or under the stimulus or the fear of a cruel lash. She was a picker of
cotton. She labored at the sugar mill and in the tobacco factory. When,,
through weariness or sickness, she had fallen behind her allotted task, then
came, as punishment, the fearful stripes upon her shrinking, lacerated flesh.

"Her home life was of the most degrading nature. She lived in the
rudest huts, and partook of the coarsest food, and dressed in the scantiest
garb, and slept, in multitudinous cabins, upon the hardest boards !

" There was no sanctity of family, no binding tie of marriage, none of
the fine felicities and the endearing affections of home. Few of these
things were the lot of the Southern black woman. Instead, thereof, a
gross barbarism, which tended to blunt the tender sensibilities, to obliter-
ate feminine delicacy and womanly shame, came down as her heritage from,
generation to generation ; and it seems a miracle of providence and grace
that, notwithstanding these terrible circumstances, so much struggling
virtue lingered amid the rude cabins, that so much womanly worth and
sweetness remained, as slaveholders themselves have borne witness to.

" Freed, legally, she has been ; but the act of emancipation had no tal-
ismanic influence to reach to and alter and transform her degrading social
life. The truth is, 'Emancipation Day' found her a prostrate and de-
graded being ; and, although it has brought numerous advantages to her
sons, it has produced but the simplest changes in her social and domestic
condition. She is still the crude,* rude, ignorant mother. Remote from
cities, the dweller still in the old plantation hut, neighboring to the sulky,
disaffected master-class, who still think her freedom was a personal robbery
of themselves, none of the ' fair humanities ' have visited her humble home.
The light of knowledge has not fallen upon her eyes. The fine domes-
ticities which give the charm to family life, and which, by the refinement-
and delicacy of womanhood, preserve the civilization of nations, have not
come to her. She has still the rude, coarse labor of men. With her rude
husband, she still shares the hard service of a field-hand. Her house,
which shelters, perhaps, some six or eight children, embraces but two
rooms. Her furniture is of the rudest kind. The clothing of the house-
hold is scant and of the coarsest material ; has oft-times the garniture of
rags, and for herself and offspring is marked, not seldom, by the absens*

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106 The Black Woman of, the South.

of both hats and shoes. She has rarely been taught to sew, and the field-
labor of slavery times has kept her ignorant of the habitudes of neatness
and the requirements of order. Indeed, coarse iood, coarse clothes, coarse
living, coarse manners, coarse companions, coarse surroundings, coarse
neighbors, both white and black, yea, everything coarse, down to the coarse,
ignorant, senseless religion, which excites her sensibilities and starts her
passions, go to make up the life of the masses of black women in the ham-
lets and villages of the South. This is the state of black womanhood.

" And now look at the vastness of this degradation. If I had been
speaking of the population of a city, or town, or even a village, the tale
would be a sad and melancholy one. But I have brought before you the
condition of millions of women. And when you think that the masses of
these women live in the rural districts ; that they grow up in rudeness
and ignorance ; that their former masters are using few means to break up
their hereditary degradation, you can easily take in the pitiful condition of
this population and forecast the inevitable future to multitudes of females,
unless a mighty special effort is made for the improvement of the black
womanhood of the South.

... "I am anxious for a permanent and uplifting civilization to be engrafted
on the Negro race in this land. And this can only be secured through the
womanhood of a race. If you want the civilization of a people to reach
the very best elements of their being, and then, having reached them,
there to abide as an indigenous principle, you must imbue the womanhood
of that people with all its elements and qualities. Any movement which
passes by the female sex is an ephemeral thing. Without them, no true
nationality, patriotism, religion, cultivation, family life, or true social status,
is a possibility. In this matter it takes two to make one — mankind is a
duality. The male may bring, as an exotic, a foreign graft, say, of civiliza-
tion, to a new people. But what then ? Can a graft live or thrive of it-
self? By no manner of means. It must get vitality from the stock into
which it is put ; and it is the women who give the sap to every human or-
ganization which thrives and flourishes on earth.

" I plead, therefore, for the establishment of at least one large ' In-
dustrial school' in every Southern State for the black girls of the
South. I ask for the establishment of schools which may serve specially
the home life of the rising womanhood of my race.

" I want boarding schools for the industrial training of one hundred
and fifty or two hundred of the poorest girls, of the ages of twelve to
eighteen years.

" 1 wish the intellectual training to be limited to reading, writing,
arithmetic and geography.

" I would have these girls taught to do accurately all domestic work,
such as sweeping floors, dusting rooms, scrubbing, bed-making, washing
and ironing, sewing, mending and knitting.

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W$$& ' The Black Woman- of the South. , 107

I would have the trades of dress-making, millinery, straw-plating,
tailoring for men, and such like, taught them.

" The art of cooking should be made a specialty, and every girl should
be instructed in it.

" In connection with these schools, garden plats should be cultivated,
*ahd every girl should be required daily, to spend at least an hour in learn-
ing the cultivation of small fruits, vegetables and flowers.

" It is hardly possible to exaggerate either the personal, family or so-
ciety influence which would flow from these schools. Every class, yea,
every girl in an out-going class, would be a missionary of thrift, industry,
common-sense, and practicality. They would go forth, year by year, a
leavening power into the houses, towns and villages of the Southern black
population ; girls fit to be the wives of the honest peasantry of the South,
■> the worthy matrons of their numerous households.

"I am looking after the domestic training of the masses; for the
raising up of women meet to be the helpers of poor men, the rank and
file of black society, all through the rural districts of the South.

" A true civilization can only be attained when the life of woman is
reached, her whole being permeated by noble ideas, her fine taste enriched
by culture, her tendencies to the beautiful gratified and developed, her
< singular and delicate nature lifted up to its full capacity, and then, when
all these qualities are fully matured, cultivated and sanctified, all their
sacred influences shall circle around ten thousand firesides, and the cabins
of the humblest freedmen shall become the homes of Christian refinement
through the influence of the uplifted and cultivated black woman of the
South."

x

The above appeal is in the line of our American Missionary Association
work. While we have higher schools and institutions for more thorough
education, which these Negro women need as much as any women in the
world, we are increasingly developing this idea which Dr. Crummell elo-
quently pleads,
'v We remind our friends and those Christian women who are interested

|' in the uplifting of Negro womanhood, that the American Missionary Asso-

ciation, the ordained agency of the Congregational Churches for this work, ^
could do much more of it if the means were forthcoming. The marked -
success of the domestic training in our schools at Tougaloo, Miss., Talla-
dega, Ala., Thomas ville, Ga., Memphis, Tenn., and other points, shows the .,
advantage gained in the twenty-five years' experience which the A M. A.
has had in its work for the Negroes.

We need the co-operation of all Christian women in carrying on these -
Industrial Schools already established, and to enable us to establish and
carry forward many more.

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YOUNG FOLKS.

WHAT SUSI£ FOUND AT TOUGALOO.

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A roomful of girls of various sizes and complexions, all very much in-
^tent upon their work, and no one thinking just at that moment of a trav-
eled fairy daughter, to adopt and love as her own, sent by a beneficent and
tender-hearted northern "Fay." I doubt if Susie ever before saw so many
£* little women " laboring with needles and trying to set the troublesome
stitches straight and even, to keep the thread from tangling and the seam
•clean. The results are far from perfection, but they are encouraging.

Some . of the children wear thimbles, and some set them upon their
<Jesks and wiggle the needle through without their aid. Here is a child
► so tiny that no thimble in the box will serve her. She has a delicate face,
with big brown eyes, and her fingers are the slenderest of appendages to
her atoms of hands. Her sister, a year or so older, has a round, chubby
face, with plump, dimpled, brown hands, but these fat fingers also must
grow to the smallest thimble. Here is a quiet, modest little girl whose
■i -five baptismal names, Cynthia Ann Finetta Bloomfield Celeste, furnish her
nothing prettier for every day use than " Lusty." She could not thread
• * needle or tie a knot when she joined the Hope Band, and the second year
; she wore one of the smallest thimbles with a bit of cloth inside for " chink-
ing " to keep it on. Here Susie's sympathies are drawn out towards a thin,
nervous-looking little Frances, who has a hand and foot crippled. She
walks painfully along to her place and holds her work at a disadvantage in
the poor little cramped left hand, but she likes to be there with the others.

Most of the heads are covered with little tight braids, on some heads
^standing at every angle, on some laid smoothly down, one braid tied to
another. A few have their curly hair cropped close, and here is a little
girl with a bushy mass overshadowing her lively face. She takes but a
stitch or two until she goes up to the front and holds her work out for her
,- teacher's inspection. Some time elapses before that lady can notice it and
say, "That is pretty good, Lena ; now go right on carefully." Lena re-
turns slowly to her place, takes a stitch or two more and repeats the per-
formance. When will the work be completed ? 0 no, that is the way she
used to do, but now

A middle-sized "Topsy" comes pushing rudely forward, tossing her
head and whispering disagreeable things to those she has to pass, and
; . Susy hopes she will not be brought into any closer relations with her\
"when she happens to see her tenderly fondling a broken-armed, broken-
legged dollie, while her work is being adjusted, and thinks somewhat
better of her. There are several Lilies and Roses in this growing garden.
The lilies are not white and the roses are not red, but more attractive and
interesting to their teacher's eyes than the black pansies the flower gar-

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